“Always a possibility. A likelihood, even. Tim would have wanted to understand. Himself, them, whatever.” But Freddie sounded so sombre when he said all this that Manette knew there was more.
She said, “And then what, Freddie?”
“Well, then it switches from photographs to film. Live action. And the actors— or whoever they are— change as well.” He rubbed at his chin and she could hear the scritch of his palm against the whiskers on his flesh and it came to her how comforting a sound that was, although she couldn’t have told him why.
She said, “Do I want to know how the actors change?”
“Men and boys,” he said. “Young boys, Manette. They look round ten to twelve years old. And the films themselves…” Freddie hesitated before he looked at her squarely, his dark eyes reflecting the depth of his concern. “Young boys ‘performing’ on older men, sometimes alone but more often in groups. I mean, it’s always just one young boy but sometimes there’s more than one man. There’s even… well, it’s a mockery of the Last Supper except it isn’t feet-washing that ‘Jesus’ is engaged in and ‘Jesus’ looks round nine years old.”
“Dear God.” Manette tried to put it together: why Tim’s interest would have gone from naked women displaying their genitals to male/female sex to male/male sex and then eventually to man/young boy sex. She didn’t know enough about young adolescent males to understand if this was natural curiosity or something more sinister. She feared the latter. Who wouldn’t? she thought. She said, “What d’you think we should…?” but had no way to frame the rest of the question because she didn’t know what the next step was beyond handing it all over to the police and a child psychologist and hoping for the best from there. She said, “I mean, for him to be searching this stuff out… We’ll have to tell Niamh, at the very least. But of course, what good will that do?”
Freddie shook his head. “He’s not been searching, Manette.”
“I don’t understand. You just said— ”
“Aside from the pictures of women and men and the male/male sex, which we might be able to attribute to his confusion about his father and Kaveh, he’s not been searching at all.”
“Then…?” She twigged. “He’s been sent this stuff?”
“There’s a trail of e-mails from someone calling himself Toy4You. They lead all the way back to a chat room for photography. I should guess that various routes through that chat room lead on to types of photography or photographic models or quirky photography or nude photography or any number of potential subjects from which users can then go into more-private chat rooms for more-private chats. The Web is called the Web for a reason. Threads lead everywhere. You just have to follow them.”
“What does this Toy4You have to say?”
“What you’d expect of a slow seduction. ‘Bit of harmless fun,’ ‘shows affection,’ ‘between consenting adults, of course,’ ‘must be of age,’ and then the switch to ‘Have a look at this and tell me what you think,’ ‘would you ever consider,’ et cetera.”
“Freddie, what’s Tim saying in reply?”
Freddie tapped his fingers on the desk. He appeared to be trying to formulate an answer. Either that or he was attempting to put together the pieces. Manette prompted him by saying his name again. He finally said, “Tim actually appears to be striking a bargain with this person.”
“With Toy4You?”
“Hmm. Yes. The bloke— I assume it’s a bloke— says in the last one, ‘You do something like this and I’ll do whatever you want.’”
“What’s ‘this’?” Manette asked, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“He’s referring to another video attached.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Garden of Gethsemane,” Freddie said. “But the Roman soldiers don’t make any arrest.”
Manette said, “My God.” And then with her eyes widening and her hand lifted to cover her mouth, “‘I’ll do anything you want’? Freddie, oh my God, do you think Tim arranged for this person to kill Ian?”
Freddie rose quickly, the chair scraping the floor. He came to her and said, “No, no,” and touched her cheek briefly. “That last one… It postdates Ian’s drowning. Whatever Tim wants, it’s something besides his father’s death. And it looks to me like he’s going to receive it in exchange for being part of a pornographic film.”
“But what could he want? And where is he? Freddie, we have to find him.”
“We do indeed.”
“But how…?” Then she recalled the map she’d seen and she rustled for it again among the items that had been on Tim’s desk. She said, “Wait, wait,” and then she found it. But a glance told her the map was going to be of little use. For it was an enlarged section of some unnamed town and unless Freddie knew where Lake, Oldfield, Alexandra, Woodland, and Holly Roads were, they were going to have to waste time trying to rustle up a street atlas, sort out how to use this information on the Internet, or perform some magical feat to discover what town in Cumbria contained these places.
She said, “It’s nothing, nothing. It’s just streets, Freddie,” and she shoved the map at him. She said, “What next? We must find him. We must.”
He gave the map a glance and folded it quickly. He unplugged the laptop and said, “Let’s be off.”
“Where?” she asked. “Where on earth… Do you know?” God, she thought, why had she ever divorced this man?
“No idea,” he said. “But I’ve a notion who will.”
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
Lynley made excellent time. The Healey Elliott had been designed originally as a racing car, and despite its age it did not disappoint. He had no flashing lights to use, but the time of day and year did not make them necessary. He was coursing off the motorway in an hour’s time, at which point the slickness of the streets and the heaviness of the mist encouraged him to have care with regard to his speed.
The difficult bit was getting from the motorway over to Milnthorpe and from Milnthorpe to Arnside. Off the motorway, the roads were narrow, not one of them was straight, there were few lay-bys into which slow drivers could pull to allow him to pass, and every farmer in Cumbria appeared to have chosen this day to move his tractor like a lumbering pachyderm from one spot to another.
Lynley felt a sense of rising urgency. It had to do with Deborah. God only knew what she would stumble into at this point, but she was obstinate enough to do something mad that would put her straight into the path of danger. How, he wondered, did Simon manage not to wring her neck?
Along the route from Milnthorpe to Arnside, at last, he saw the fog. Unlike the little cats’ feet of the poem, this bank of grey was moving across the empty plain of Morecambe Bay’s ebbed tide with startling swiftness, as if pulled along by unseen horses dragging a mantle of coal smoke behind them.
He slowed at Arnside village. He’d not been to Arnside House, but he knew where it was from Deborah’s description. He passed a pier jutting into the wide and waterless channel of the estuarial River Kent and he braked to allow a woman with a pushchair to cross the street, a child hanging on to her trousers with a mittened hand and otherwise bundled against the chill. As they crossed— taking their bloody time about it, he thought, and why was it that when one was in a hurry, all occasions conspired against one?— he read the sign warning all the dangers of this place. Fast Rising Tides! it shouted, Quicksands! Hidden Channels! Danger! Beware! Why on earth, he wondered futilely, would someone want to bring up children here when one wrong move at one wrong time of day would snatch them towards a watery end?